Email Marketing: Still Going Strong

In our conversations with Snack Krackle Pop we learned about the value of email marketing.
Popcorn Guy: You know, we’ve done some other things before, just on the smaller, with Constant Contact. We started creating a newsletter to try to get people out because we really wanted to do some tracking. We’ve done some direct mail pieces before with the Indianapolis Colts that they’ve done and we found that we didn’t get a really lot of good retur n on that. It was an expensive thing for us and we had no tracking, we had no idea if people received them or got them. The only tracking that we had is if actually someone came and bought something off, you know, the internet. But we never really to find out, you know, what they liked or didn’t like, you know.
And so we started using Constant Contact to send out a newsletter, and that worked really well ‘cause it gave us some analytics, you know. We were able to see some click throughs, open rate, you know, and people who unsubscribed to it so we know not to send back to them. It really started getting us to be a more targeted market. I started working for Exact Target just a while back and have really learned about the segmentation.
This is something we’re looking into, is really trying to find a segmented market for us, you know, in the popcorn, what people are wanting. Are they wanting corporate gifts or are they wanting something for a wedding, are they wanting something for fundraising, and really trying to find those markets so that we can send relevant, you know, information to them though the emails so we’re not just blasting stuff out and hoping to catch a few people with a wide net.
Steve: So they basically do the targeting for you or they do research for you? How do you use them?
Popcorn Guy: Exact Target is a one to one email based marketing company. They have a platform that is very easy to use, very user friendly. They have a very high deliverability rate because they have really great relationships with different ISPs. So their product allows us to create content that’s very specific to the people that we want, using the data that we get from our website or from, you know, emails that we send out. We, you know, figure out the analytics from those click throughs. And they can create a dynamic content, so that we know if it’s a guy that we’re sending to, they might get one kind of content, and if it’s a female that we’re sending to, they get a different kind of content. And we can do that really quickly, you know. It’s kind of automated where we’re doing it with one press of a send button and all those filters are sending the different emails out, which really helps us, like I say, to reach, you know, different people at different levels.
Steve: So you’ve started a program already?
Popcorn Guy: We’re in talks with them right now.
Steve: What’s the cost parameters for an email program? Is it per email or is a total cost? How do they price themselves? Excuse me. And then it’s $500 for 10,000 emails and-- which is five cents an email. And the more you go up the less, you know, the less amount of money it costs to send those out. So it’s basically pennies an email which is really great for us, because again, we don’t have a printing cost, we don’t have a postage cost, and we have the analytics of who’s doing what.
Steve: What kind of targeting have they helped you do so far? Have you decided that you’re gonna go after school principals or business owners? Where have you decided to use their targeting so far?
Popcorn Guy: Well that’s one of the things that we’re really going through hard data right now and trying to figure out what kind of data that we have. When we did a tour this summer with the Colts we did a sign up to win, you know, free tickets to the Colts. So we have a lot of names and a lot of email addresses. So I think the first thing that we’re gonna do right now with them is actually send out what they call an opt in campaign and kind of just send a general email out to see who wants to opt in and then kind of get an idea-- they have what they call smart capture where you can create a form, you know, within the email or on a landing page and really get some more information about people. Do people want discounts, do people want to see the newsletter, do people want only information on the Colts and appearances, you know, for people that are-- appearances like if we have any Colts appearances or if we have any Rupert appearances, things like that. So we can really segment that out if people want information on fundraising, if they want information on iCare. So once we do that initial blast to people and really start scrubbing down our email lists and getting preference, then we can target people, you know, that we want from there.
Steve: Sounds like you’ve done some investigation and you’re learning as you go. Popcorn Guy: Definitely, definitely learning as we go.

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“we use newsletters to get information from our customers. have a poll or a survey. it can be short, and even fun: where are you going on vacation? what tv show are you enjoying this summer? then post results in a future newsletter. people love taking polls.of course, always best to use a poll topic that is of interest to your audience.our customers are into new bands, especially hip-hop. we like to poll about "who's hot" in order to let them chime in about their favorites, and it also let's us get a sense of trends.”anson l , natchez, miss clothing store

"word of mouth spread offline is more positive and more likely to be interpreted as credible than wom spread online, according to a recent research study from womma member company the keller fay group. fifty-nine percent of those surveyed indicted they found wom transmitted face-to-face and on the phone was "highly" credible, versus 49% for online wom. the study also found that 66% of face-to-face wom communication was "mostly positive" versus 57% of the impressions on blogs and chat rooms. offline wom was also found to be 7% more likely to lead to purchase intent, according to the research." marsha t., advertising agency, baton rouge. la.

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